All twelve female Democratic senators wrote a letter to Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) on Thursday asking him to halt movement on House legislation aimed at rolling back the Obama administration's contraception mandate.

The letter, obtained by the Washington Post's Greg Sargent, reflects an effort to force House Republicans to publicly concede defeat in the contraception wars -- the battle was effectively over when the Blunt amendment was struck down in the Senate last week.

Questions about women and womens’ health have dominated the political debate over the past weeks, and at least one female Republican lawmaker is unhappy with her party’s record. New York Assemblyman Teresa Sayward (R), who is retiring after serving a decade in Albany, told the New York political program Capital Tonight that she does not support any of her party’s presidential candidates, because of their stances on women.

She also took an apparent shot at Republicans’ opposition to President Obama’s birth control mandate, saying, “It’s disheartening for me to see our party move away from what it was always about and that is to stay out of people’s lives, let them live their lives, don’t impose their religion on anybody else.”

After targeting Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke last week and journalist Tracie McMillan this week, Limbaugh turned his sights on Washington Post comedy writer Alexandra Petri today. Petri wrote a column for the Post’s comedy section yesterday, but Limbaugh apparently had a bit of an Onion problem and assumed Petri was a reporter, not a satirist. Limbaugh attacks the “so-called reporter” (she’s not actually called that) for inserting her “b-i-itchy opinion” into her “reporting” (which was not actually reporting). Again, Limbaugh apparently can’t help but use gendered slurs to attack his female critics.

Thankfully it looks like his advertisers are responding and still leaving in droves. As Media Matters reported, his show contained over five minutes of dead air space on his program today and out of the 86 ads that were aired today, 77 of them were free public service announcements donated by the Ad Council.

Comments

We welcome relevant, respectful comments. Any comments that are sexist or in any other way deemed hateful by our staff will be deleted and constitute grounds for a ban from posting on the site. Please refer to our Terms of Service (revised 3/17/2016) for information on our posting policy.